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Wednesday, June 03, 2009
Yo Quiero Better Writing
Title: Edge of Battle
Author: Dale "no, not Dan" Brown
Bookmark: the doorknob tag that told me my oven had been fixed. Again.
Have you ever been flipping through channels late at night and found some awful SciFi original movie--not something they adapted from a book, or some half-assed sequel to something with a real production budget, but something truly their own--with a name like Alligator! or Horror Mountain? I've been there. In the first 30 picoseconds, you figure, "hell, it has some horrific beast with lots of teeth and some sort of mutagenic origin, and that shapely paleocryptoxenobiologist isn't bad for ogling when she's not phoning in her stilted lines. I'll give it a shot," and by the time five seconds are past, you've already decided that it has stolen vital moments of your lifetime from you, and not only will you never, ever get those moments back, but you're also sober enough that you're forced to remember it all.
This book is like that. Except it took me longer to realize how awful it was (I'm not a super-fast reader), and yet... I kept reading. However, I only kept reading so I could loudly pan it in this space. I only hope my harsh criticism will do it justice.
The damn thing starts with several pages of ... let's call it glossary. First, a wide cast of characters, which was strange only because it names some characters who exist for only a paragraph or two, and omits a couple that turn out to be comparably important. Plus, any reasonably intelligent person should be able to figure out who's who by reading the damn book. On the other hand, a reasonably intelligent person wouldn't have read the whole book. Next is a list of technologies and weapons, many of them invented by the author, and finally a glossary of various abbreviations. This was somewhat useful, but again everything I didn't already know was defined in the context of the book anyway, so... why?
The second glossary got me interested. It promised lots of high-tech weaponry, and some sort of robotic exosuit used by the good guys. I thought with ten-foot robot warriors going after terrorists, there had to be something awesome. By the end of the book, I hated the damned robots. It takes a lot to make me hate robots, especially ones used by the good guys. I became an engineer largely because of R2-D2.
The plot, mangled convoluted mess that it is, centers on rising hostilities between the US and Mexico over immigration law. Eventually we find out that a lot of it is being orchestrated for... some reason never fully specified, and there's also some Russian terrorist mastermind who seems to be leftover from a previous book. The thought that there is more than one book in this series scares me more than the Russian terrorists. I'm also unsettled that I could never figure out whether the author sides witht he extremist right-wing, or was satirizing them. Was he playing as Rush Limbaugh, or Stephen Colbert on meth?? I couldn't tell!!
Every chapter is riddled with inconsistencies--the robots keep changing size, they fold in ways that would make even Michael Bay call "bullshit", people suddenly appear in one place after reporting in from another, weapons disappear right out of their hands, and I'm pretty sure a lot of the Spanish was improperly translated--and the dialog made me want to burn things. Usually after finishing a book I don't need to keep (or return to the library), I'd stick it in a box and ship it to Cleveland or DC, but I think I'd rather tear this one in half and stuff it in the recycling. It's not just terrible writing, it's politically offensive terrible writing.Labels: politics, shit, terrorism
posted by reyn at
6:26 PM
3
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Tuesday, June 02, 2009
Voulez-vous la guerre avec moi? Non.
Title: Jackdaws
Author: Ken Follett
Here's the deal: in order to break German lines of communication in World War Two, the British Special Operations Executive send their best undercover operative (who has spent two years coordinating the French Resistance) to Reims, France to blow up a major telephone exchange, thereby facilitating the Normandy invasion.
Here's the catch: her (yes, her) team is composed entirely of women. And since most able-bodied women are already assigned elsewhere to help the war effort, she's not getting the pick of the litter. Her team includes a felonious Gypsy, a pathological liar, a sexagenarian safe-cracker, two noblewomen (one a remorseless blabbermouth, the other with zero regard for rank or military protocol), and a transvestite. OK, so they're not ALL women.
Pitted against them is a ruthless German interrogator and his woman-on-the-side, a French hottie whose Jewish grandmother is a secret from the rest of the SS.
Here's the problem: Much as I like spy thrillers and strong female leads and interesting twists on how to handle clandestine operations, this was neither thrilling nor interesting, and the chicks weren't quite strong enough. It had just enough to keep me reading until I was done, but only barely. There was only one surprise (more on that later); the people you expect to hook up all hook up, the people you expect to hate, you hate, and the people you expect to like, you like. All the things you think will happen? They do. The heroine even marries the charming American with 1.5 ears in the epilogue, just as you know she will when they first meet and begrudgingly check each other out. The only surprise was one of the romantic pairings, and even that surprise was relatively minor.
It's a decent read, if there's not much else around (there wasn't), but it never grabbed me, and I actually started rooting for major characters to get killed off just to shake things up. Naturally, they ended up killing one of the characters I liked, right after allowing some character development, and allowed all the stagnant characters to march through to the epilogue. Wheee.
On the one hand, I found it lying on a bench in the airport, so I'm only out some time, but on the other hand, reading vivid descriptions of brutal interrogation practices was deeply unsettling. I think the best part of the entire book was the theory that in Britain, an American--even one missing most of an ear--qualifies as a sexy foreigner.Labels: espionage, historical fiction, war
posted by reyn at
4:39 PM
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Thursday, May 21, 2009
I don't melt in the rain, bitches
(HC release 06/09/09) Au: Katherine Howe Bookmark: the giant wrap-around back cover thingee on the ARC ed.
A very early reviewer (also being a staffer at my illustrious workplace) compared this book to Monster's of Templeton, and for this review was granted space on the splash page of the ARC. I have to agree with his assessment. Both stories boast a fairly similar heroine and both manage to bring elements of the fantastic into the "real" world where the books are set in a very casual way - as if giant lake monsters and actual witches in colonial Salem are everyday stuff. I think 'Monsters' accomplishes this in a more subtle way - as the townspeople don't seem particularly shocked by the monster (although the outside world is), while Connie is continually taken aback by what she finds as she pursues the Physick Book. I suppose this makes 'Physick' more realistic and 'Monsters' more fun.
Connie is a graduate student in colonial american history who gets sucked into trying to pull together her dead grandmother's abondoned, centuries-old house near Salem Mass., while her hippy-dippy mother spends her time reading auras on the west coast. All the while, she's supposed to be figuring out what to do for her dissertation. While picking through the items left in the house (an electricity and phone free house), she comes across the name of a Deliverance Dane. Luckily armed with professional-level histrical research skills and a cute boy who does restorations for a living, Connie tries to track down records of Deliverance, thinking that this little character would be a great start on her original disseration. She finds pretty quickly that efforts have been made to erase Deliverance from certain records completely, which brings her to understand that this character was not only involved in the Salem trials, but was also somehow set apart from the other accused women in the minds of the populace at the time. Meanwhile, we flash back to the 1690's and watch Deliverance herself moving through life, as well as eventually following some of her descendants. The result is a picture of a long line of no-nonsense ladies. Gotta love the girl power.
I liked each of the story lines in this novel, but in a different way. The modern day action moves more quickly (as you might expect), and draws you in with it's speed, but not necessarily with it's depth. The flashback scenes I found more compelling and think that their slower speed may have even helped add to the sense of stress, burden and foreboading that present themselves at different points in the history.
I'm not sure how to characterize this book. It's not "literature." It might be a historical novel with a thriller twist. I hate to call this chick-lit, because it's better than that, but I'm afraid the abundance of strong ladies in the book might scare off many gentlemen readers, just as if they were stuck in room with all the characters. Labels: books, fantasy, girl power, history, witches
posted by ~e at
1:01 PM
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Monday, May 04, 2009
What a cast of characters!
Title: The Somnambulist
Author: Jonathan Barnes
Be warned. This book has no literary value whatsoever. It is a lurid piece of nonsense, convoluted, implausible, peopled by unconvincing characters, written in drearily pedestrian prose, frequently ridiculous and willfully bizarre. Needless to say, I doubt you'll believe a word of it (p. 5, opening paragraph)
The narrator of The Somnambulist, an unidentified writer who admits that he has at times both embellished and completely deviated from the truth, tells the tale of Edward Moon, a washed up magician whose show contains elements that may not be simply tricks of the eye. Case in point: the Somnambulist, his mute milk-loving assistant, who endures swords being stuck through his chest during Edward's act.
Edward also sometimes moonlights as a detective for the London police and is called on early in the book to assist with a heinous, mystifying crime. While attempting to solve the case, he encounters such characters as the Archivist, The Human Fly, Samuel Taylor Cooleridge, the albino Mr. Skimpole, and Thomas Cribb, a man who is living life backwards - going from the future to the present to the past. He also uncovers a secret organization known simply as Love, Love, Love, and Love.
With its occasional foray into the world of the supernatural, Jonathan Barnes' dark novel reminded me of something Neil Gaiman would write. Definitely worth checking out. I am looking forward to reading more of his second novel, The Domino Men.Labels: crazy fiction, mystery/detective
posted by Kate at
11:33 AM
1
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Sunday, May 03, 2009
snippet of history
Ti: An Irreverent Curiosity: In Search of the Church's Strangest Relic in Italy's Oddest Town
(ARC ed; HC pub Jul 2009)
Au: David Farley
Author Farley, who writes for travel pieces for mags and somehow manages to use that to support living abroad for periods of time (don't we all wish), becomes focused on trying to find out what happened to a vanished Catholic relic - the foreskin of Jesus Christ. Yup. The only piece of Christ's flesh that could have reasonably been left behind on earth when he ascended after the resurrection, and the Church had it (and for a while, had like 10 or more of them in different locations around medieval Europe), but then they lost it, or so the story goes.
Farley settles into a really eclectic Italian village where the recognized true foreskin had been in residence until 1986 when it was supposedly stolen by two mysterious villagers, or reclaimed by the Vatican, or sold by the priest, or hidden away because the Church wanted to downplay such items. The fate of the foreskin depended on which tipsy, hippy-dippy, obsessed or skittish resident Farley asked in this nutty town, known for having a lot of "outsiders" from other parts of Italy and the world living there. It would seem that if you move more than 50 miles in Italy, you are an outsider to the residents of whatever town you land in. The Church, as one might expect, had nothing much to say.
I liked the book. It was light, entertaining, and gave some good history about the Church (while not Catholic myself, I have to concede that until my ancestors protested against it [and in some cases against both the Catholics AND Martin Luther, boy were they lonely] Catholic history covers a huge part of all Christian history), and gave fun descriptions of eccentric people and nifty places I can probably never hope to see. And that's what travel writing should, yeah? Not high lit or anything, but it gets the job done.
(for those of you who may know who this is, I will be forwarding this to soon-to-be-Dr. Ms. C. Kovacs - just seems like it's up her alley :-)Labels: foreskin, hippies, italy, religion, travel
posted by ~e at
11:10 AM
1
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Oddly Bland
Ti: The Indifferent Stars Above: The Harrowing Saga of a Donner Party Bride
(ARC Ed, HC pub Jun 09)
Au: Daniel James Brown
Bookmark: Dogeared corners, b/c I'm racist against ARCs
I had never read or heard much about the Donner Party, and only knew the most basic of details about what they resorted too. That was my main reason for picking up the book, and had I already known quite a bit about the history, I might not have finished this account.
The author tries to tell the story, not really from the perspective of one member of the party, Sarah Graves, but does focus on her quite a bit, I suppose as a way to humanize it. Somehow, the author manages to wander around in the zone between a solid history and a telling of one person's experiences without really managing either. Granted, in his intro, he explains nearly all of the issues I had with the book, so I can't blame him for missing the mark - he wrote what he was aiming for: its not meant to be a comprehensive history, Sarah left little of her own writing, and so some things had to be inferred. While I'm sure the author is correct in saying that he can use universal human reactions to certain situations such as extreme cold and hunger to describe what the pioneers went through, he somehow does it in a squishy, timid way that just makes me feel deeply the fact that it's inferred and not altogether a solid fact about what was happening to anyone at the given time described.
All that said, what solid history he does cover is covered in an engaging way, and I wanted to read the whole thing to find out what happened to these people. Even though it was hard to connect what he described to Sarah in my mind, I was pretty fascinated by the physical, emotional and psychological reactions he describes people having in the face of these extreme conditions.
I wanted to really like this book, as it falls into one of my favorite reading categories of "creative non-fiction," but in the end I have to give it a high meh.
Labels: cannibalism, creative nonfiction, o pioneers, touchy-feely history
posted by ~e at
12:27 AM
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Tuesday, April 21, 2009
Bernie in the rough
Title: Burglars Can't Be Choosers
Author: Lawrence Block
Bookmark: stub from airport parking lot
I wanted to check out Bernie Rhodenbarr's origins, so I hunted down the first book in the series. Apparently, it took a while for Bernie to fully ripen into my favorite Gentleman Burglar. While the first Bernie book is just as funny and engaging as the rest of the stories of his escapades I've read, he's still a little rough, not yet polished into the suave character I met much later in his life. Plus, he hasn't met Carolyn yet, though he does meet a Trusty Sidekick early in the story.
This time, Bernie has been hired to procure a blue leather-covered box from an old roll top desk. He is not told what is inside the box, nor why it is so important, only that he will be payed handsomely for his efforts. Instead, the cops bust in halfway through the job, a body is found, and Bernie bolts. He knows he didn't kill the guy, but he has to convince the cops of that, and the best way to do it is by figuring out who did, and why. That involves lamming in a poker buddy's apartment, getting friendly with the girl who comes by to water the plants, breaking into a couple other places, tracking down the shady character who hired him, and bribing a cop. All in a day's work, right?
In some of the later Bernie stories, he has this sort of aloof charm with the ladies--he mentions them in passing, but it's never that big a deal. In Bernie's premiere, Block seems more interested in heavily asserting that Bernie is a sexy bastard, while maintaining the pulp mores that keep him from being too explicit. Still, Bernie charms one woman into bed almost immediately, and another seems ready to hump his leg using a variety of costumes and... appliances... as soon as they are properly acquainted. Perhaps this says more about the ladies than it does Bernie, but the scene in which picking a lock serves as foreplay ("I think it would make me hot.") probably says more about Block. Let the burglar burgle, Lawrence. That's sexy enough on its own--there's really no need to keep throwing women at the man to prove it.Labels: burglary, murder, mystery/detective, theater
posted by reyn at
11:03 AM
0
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Friday, April 03, 2009
Slightly Reformed Burglar vs. Anti-Semitic Kipling
Title: The Burglar Who Liked to Quote Kipling
Author: Lawrence Block
Bookmark: nametag from a wedding invitation
I've been plowing through a long string of mysteries lately, and they're almost always fun, but few are ever as much fun as a Bernie Rhodenbarr mystery. Bernie is one of Lawrence Block's more likable creations, a burglar who got tired of going to prison and opened a bookshop. Apparently, he's learned a lot from the mistakes he's made in the past, because he burgles at least five places just in this book--one of them twice--and his only interaction with the police is a slightly dirty cop who keeps trying to get him to acquire a fur coat for his wife.
Bernie is brilliant. In the first chapter, he foils a shoplifter in his store, charges the man for the stolen property, and when the man protests that he doesn't want the books (he was only going to resell them to other dealers), Bernie buys them back for 20% of what he charged the man. The shoplifter leaves $40 lighter, and Bernie pockets the forty bucks and reshelves the books.
Soon he's hired to steal a rare, one-of-a-kind printing of a bad book-length Kipling poem, is held at gunpoint for the pilfered pages, gets framed for murder, and goes on the lam in his friend Carolyn's apartment, fighting one of her cats for the big chair by the radio. To stay ahead of everyone, Bernie has to figure out who stole the book from him, who framed him for murder, who has the book now, why it's so damned important, and somehow hand over all guilty parties to the police without getting nabbed himself. No problem. Because Bernie is brilliant, funny as hell, and aided by his loyal sidekick and lesbian dog-groomer soulmate Carolyn.Labels: burglary, mystery/detective, special abilities
posted by reyn at
4:55 PM
2
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